Murder on Fletcher Ice Island
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- čas přidán 2. 05. 2024
- In something out of a suspense movie, in 1970 a shooting on a nearly inaccessible ice island left a Navy research division desperately seeking answers- How do authorities deal with an alleged murder in one of the most remote places on the planet? The shocking Murder on Fletcher’s Ice Island deserves to be remembered.
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Script by THG
#history #thehistoryguy #truecrime
The old "The gun just went off" defense. Without adding "while my finger was on the trigger".
I call that a Maxwell Smart defense: "Would you believe...?"
It never ceases to amaze me how often guns will carefully aim themselves at some poor victim's center mass and fire themselves without a finger on the trigger. I've studied my own firearms carefully and cannot figure out how this could happen, especially as often as lawyers use this "firearm malfunction" as a murder defense.
Seems to be what Alec Baldwin is going with
@@WacoUIC1933 That reminds me of golf commentators always talking about a player's putter letting him down, as if it's the club's fault that he makes lousy putts.
It seemed to have worked out well for him, he got his revenge and got off the hook.
And here I thought this “murder” would go into the cold case file.
That physically hurt
I see what you did there
Truly a cold blooded crime.
"You're as cold as ice/you're willing to sacrifice/our love....."
Couldn't get much colder!
Nice Dad joke.
A man is killed, but no crime was committed. Things that make you go humm. 🤔
I hate hearing that he got away with murder. He made the overt act of getting the rifle obviously to at least threaten the other guy and therefore caused the chain of events, whether or not the rifle was defective.
According to the jury it was not murder. They certainly got a more complete story than even THG can manage from the scattered data today. Brandishing a firearm dos not constitute murder.
No crime was committed. Except maybe by the jury.
Oh yes, send in the lawyers. As Thomas Jefferson remarked "lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour."
An attorney is someone you curse for their behavior until you need their assistance.
I used to volunteer at a historic village. We put on a weekend skit of a murder, funeral, and trial. We got a retired lawyer and the county attorney to play parts. We didn't give them scripts. We should have. It might have cut a good hour from the trial.
I'm hiding in honduras, I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The shit has hit the fan - Warren Zevon
lol Jefferson was a lawyer
I often think of how fortunate the world is that an amazing guy was left with a choice to make and the choice he made was The History Guy channel.
I took the road less traveled by…
@@TheHistoryGuyChannel And that has made all the difference! 😊
The first thing you do is freeze the crime scene
Okay... done!
An amazing story to say the least.I was in a sub shop late one night and an older gentlemen came in that reminded me of santa claus.He told me he can just came home from doing a tour at the south pole.We talked for a while and he mentioned something about an ATM machine with the station only having one.He said he was glad to get back to civilazation .He was a geolagists and had been working at the south pole for 3 yrs.Pardon my spelling.Thanks history guy.
What a cool story! No pun intended.
“Pre-Jethro Gibbs era” that’s a hysterical Easter-egg!
Caught that as soon as the NIS crest showed up, and got a chuckle out of the full explanation.
Jethro Gibbs once revealed to another character that when Dr. Mallard was young he looked like Illya Kuryakin.
@@flagmichael oh, I remember that - throwaway line, only fans would catch
@@flagmichaelso that means Ashley-Pitt was able to miraculously fake his death and assume a new identity.
That sneaky fiend.
Once again, you have fund a piece of history that most of us have not heard of which is interesting and useful. Thank you, THG.
What, no Ice Island pirates?
My retired USAF meteorologist says this was quite the story in their circles which were not in the Arctic. 🥶 our kids grew up being threatened with Ellesmere Island. (Grounding in a cold place, it seems, was the most extreme punishment he could think of.)
The Thing!
📽️🎬📽️
Yea, that was in my mind too.
Like "Ice Station Zebra" without the downed satellite, submarine and Soviet military detachment.
The balloon based extraction method was called a Fulton extraction
It was developed by the CIA in the early 1950s.
The extraction method was used on T3 to retrieve documents at least one point during the expedition to Fletchers Island.
The Fulton extraction was shown in the movie The Green Berets with John Wayne.
Using it to extract a captured North Vietnamese General.
The extraction method was replaced by longer range helicopters
The Fulton Recovery System was invented by Robert Fulton, Jr. Who was also known as the first person to circumnavigate the globe on a motorcycle. Perhaps a future episode of the History Guy?
I thought it was used in the Pacific islands during the second world war?
@@user-gl5dq2dg1j If it was it predates information that I have found.
All the trouble started when that damn German Shepherd showed up one day.
? 8:46
The Littlest Hobo got around.
I believe it was a husky mix...
"First g..d... week of winter."
What, nobody here speaks Norwegian?
The Gibbs reference was funny.
Good morning History Guy and everyone watching. Have a good weekend all.
You as well!
@@bartsanders1553 Any chance we might be related?? We have the same last name
@@RetiredSailor60 Maybe. I'm descended from Allan I of Brittany and a cousin of William the Conqueror. That's a pretty big net.
@@bartsanders1553 My paternal ancestors traced to Kentucky 1795. Maternal ancestors 1490 in England
As a Fairbanks resident, I can more than imagine how difficult the situation must have been.
There is no shuffle
There is no shuffle here
Here on the North Pole
On this quiet dome
Sunshine on crystal
And milky walls of ice
All seem so fragile
Under the polar sky (Front 242)
13:30 - Laws are so poorly-written. There is no doubt that the assailant, in anger, retrieved a g'un. Saying that responsibility for any consequent de'ath or in'jury does not attach to his knowing and voluntary act of getting the g'un is like saying that someone who DELIBERATELY and CONSCIOUSLY gets drunk and then, without intent, k'ills someone while driving home has perpetrated an "accidental" homi'cide. The illegal homi'cide is committed at the time the decision is made to attempt to get home by driving a car while unfit to do so, and there's no diminished culpability in the making of that attempt to get home. Similar "logic" has been used to acquit someone of malicious murder when, for fun, they caused a rockslide that they knew was (a) criminal to cause and (b) could not be prevented from causing de'ath should circumstances play out wrong. This is bad. People need to be held accountable for the predictable consequences of their actions, whether those consequences are planned or not. You can't just "roll the dice" on future events and then disown responsibility for the results because you INTENDED the dice to come up 7-or-11 and they didn't.
Generally, laws are written to prevent logical convictions of the innocent. William Blackstone's Formulation states "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
@@flagmichael But this guy wasn't innocent. He grabbed a g'un. Nothing that ever happened before or after he grabbed that g'un has any bearing on his culpability for grabbing a g'un. He was certainly guilty of putting a g'un into his own hands while he was angry.
Fweeu !…I’m glad that those sailing on the iceberg,
Didn’t hit an ocean liner and sink the iceberg !
She's going down by the bow... wherever the bow is.
No witnesses and the crime scene now melted into oblivion. Not even L J Gibbs could have solved that case.
Moral of the story: stay away from raisins and prunes when confined to an ice island.
What a story!
The "island" doesnt even exist anymore!
Unreal Lance..
Unreal
You should do a video on The Famous Ghost Ships of history.
Maybe individual videos.
YOU deserve to be remembered
Kurt Russell said this in Tombstone, can't be a murder without a witness. Thanks
This case sounds like a real-life Far Side cartoon combined with Captain Queeg's accusation about the theft of strawberries. The Territorial Court of the Northwest Territories ruled in 1969 in "the sea ice case" that all of the area of the Canadian arctic right up to the North Pole, even the sea ice, belonged to Canada. My father was the judge who made that ruling, and he did it for the very purpose of declaring Canadian sovereignty.
Now Canada is a Communist country. Very sad.
Back in the Saddle Again Naturally
Ice station zebra, anyone?
Was thinking the same thing - and also The Thing :-)
The Thing was what I thought of
We are showing our age.
@@john_in_phoenix We definitely are.
Fweeu ! .. I’m glad that those sailing on the iceberg didn’t hit an ocean liner,
and sink the iceberg !
Interesting end to the evening. Good night
All that, over raisin wine.
I had cinnamon raisin English muffin 🧁 for breakfast this morning 🌄 7:46
Mr. Lance didn't mention any women on the "island", tho I'm sure there were. The wine was probably just a pretext ...😄
Nobody finds Adolf's secret ufo base and lives long enough to tell the tale...
Fun tidbit, since you mentioned the TV show NCIS - in a flashback in one of the episodes with Mike Franks, Gibbs' former boss and mentor, we see the time when the NIS became NCIS. Gibbs has just gotten his new jacket and remarks to Franks that he liked the old acronym better, which earns him a head slap.
Wow, what a story! That's the historical version of the 'it was all just a dream' movie ending! 😂
It's a story about a crime that didn't happen in a place that doesn't exist.
With that kind of outcome, it's amazing how many facets of our world it effected!
Great presentation. I really enjoyed this. Thank you. My ex-husband has flown C-130 his entire career doing exactly that refilling helicopters out off of Moffat Field in California.
That would make a fascinating movie.
fascinating? meh
@@robertgiles9124 It depends on how much it is gussied up (technical term).
But what about the stolen raisin wine? Who had jurisdiction over that crime? Gibbs would have gotten to the bottom of that crime before the second commercial.
Interesting, the notion of jurisdiction. Never thought about that.
Those questions have implications for outer space.
The Thing: Arctic Edition
I like this narrator's voice! great story, too!❤
Was this rifle ever examined by forensic investigators to prove or disprove the “defective gun “ defense ?
A weapons expert did testify at trial that the weapon was defective.
Good one. I’ve been to Resolute in summer and Sachs Harbour in winter. The wind is unreal. We were weathered in for a few days by a storm. Played darts so much my right arm is now three inches longer.
Ah, bureaucracy. Where would we be without it.
I don't know. Let me get approval from the Department of Individual Investigations and I'll check that out.
Oh, gosh. Denied.
@@bartsanders1553
That’s because you didn’t First go through the “Ministry Of Reorganization And Rearrangement “. Must always go through the proper channels.
I suggest you re-file, and make sure all Documentation is in Octuplicate . 😊
If you want to know, you will have to fill out a request form. Triplicate. Notarized.
@@jeffking4176 Ultimately, he'll be referred to the Circumlocution Office.
So were these the same jurors who later served as jurors in the O.J. Simpson trial?.
They were probably driven by the expert testimony that the gun was defective. When I see verdicts that I don't understand I have to remind myself I did not see and hear what they saw and heard.
I really enjoyed this video, Ill be interviewing the case agent for NIS very soon on the CZcams channel ..NCIS: Reports from the Field. Very well done!
Back in the days of these missions, many governments sent out brave men, who often died; to fulfill research missions. My father was in the AF, then worked under contract with the AF when he got his degree. He was involved in meteorological flights, flying into crazy electrical storms to gather data. National security was always at the center of all of these flights, with intense mapping and photography of every inch of the earth. My father tells stories of those days and the crazy things they had to do. He was paid well at that time for his work as he was no longer in the AF, but under contract. Very serious work by serious men.
And there, watching over your right shoulder, is R.J. MacReady who knows a "thing" or two about living under conditions such those in this story.
those are some good lawyers...
Must have been mob lawyers.
Regardless of where, he picked up a gun in anger and someone died. How does that rate a " go home free"?
It would be tempting to consider his time on the "island" as punishment enough. I'm pretty sure the fellows would think twice about "raisin' a beer" with him afterward.
Picking up a gun in any emotional state is not a crime. If the other man had died of heart failure or hypothermia it would not be homicide, right? Without all the elements of the crime any honest jury would have to find him not guilty.
I appreciate you and thank you for making content.
After being murdered the victim was as cold as ice. You may not like the way icy humanity.
Good try.
@@navret1707 It was a good try the way icy it.
the ice island took all its secrets to a watery grave, literally
Very interesting.
thank you
Wow. Just, wow.
Well ... stuff happens.
"No crime had been committed." (?)
-Really? I mean, REALLY?!?!?! I'm sure the family of the deceased (as well as the deceased himself in the afterlife) would argue that sentiment. The man went and purposefully retrieved the rifle. It's not like he just happened to have it in his irritated state of mind. This is one of the issues with the jury system. The jurors that acquitted the accused were probably just tired of the whole thing and made the acquittal as a means to an end. This concept can also be attributed in more than one case where a jury convicts someone (hypothetically for example) just to get the trial over with so the jury can go home. Humans, because of two inherent flaws, i.e. deception and error, cannot be trusted to decide the fate of others.
We were not there.
@@flagmichael very true. (fyi: "You weren't there!" is one of my favorite expressions when it comes to scenarios such as this.)
Love your videos
You could make that story into a dark comedy.
Born and raised in central Alaska, I spent several years working on the "North Slope" 1980's.
The oil fields along the Arctic Coast along th shore of the Arctic Ocean.
Living in Atco Trailer Camps. We usually worked 12 hour days 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off when we would fly home for an R&R period.
Some workers stayed for much longer tours.
It was not uncommon for guys to get "Slopey" after a long tour. A term that anyone working in a dark, cold and isolated existence in Alaska is very familiar to.
I worked one long 7 week tour that was grueling for me personally. 12 hour work days for 49 days straight. My advice is, dont mess with a guys raison wine.
Interesting.
In April 1968 Weldy Phipps flew a Hercules Twin Otter about 500 miles to the north pole. He successfully retrieved 4 men and their equipment and flew them back to Ellesmere Island; where The Plaisted Polar Expedition base camp was. It's recounted in a book; First To The Pole, C J Ramstad & Keith Pickering. My father was one of the four. The government agencies involved made this too complicated.
History Guy might want to do a video on that.
What a deal !.....Thank THG🎀🎀🎀🎀👍
Of Ice and Men.
Interesting
Now you know where that bottle of raisin wine came from that washed up on the beach.
5:20
That is 100% The Thing!!
Interesting story.
5:16-don’t eat that yellow snow!
Amazing how far they went to get away from Stalin
I looove you history guy !
YOU'RE like MR PEABODY ❤
Last Man Standing Since 1988
This case left the international community realizing that we need agreements for cases of, say, murder in outer space. Who has jurisdiction when the Russian astronaut murders a US astronaut in the Japanese lab module of the International Space Station? There are agreements now.
Good morning! 👋🏽 😊
All over some hooch, and had the Duke boys been around ?!?!
Interesting that essentially a big iceberg can float around for 40 years. Boy will the future archeologists be confused by the remains of an encampment found where hundreds or thousands feet of water once stood and only boat remains have been found. 😂
The perfect (very expensive) crime, as the crime scene has vanished.
Yet again an indication as to why juries don't work
I guess Father Time took care of all the loose ends
That was cold…
If I remember right Rock Hudson was in Ice Station Zebra.
Makes me think of The Thing.
Remington 700?
Just like in remote places all ove US too. They have like a ranger, who will preserve the scene to wait State police n CSI. But how supid to murder someone in a town of 9?
"...the jury decided that no crime had been committed." It sounds to me that the jury may not have decided that no crime had been committed, but just that the evidence was not good enough to decide that one had. An important distinction.
After seeing the thumbnail, could you do a history on crime scene tape?
And the victims family get nil closure.
Clearly the Democratic justice system is the best that we have. But here is one of those situations where it's frustratingly wonky. Two men have a heated argument. The complaining party retrieves a firearm and the man he accused of stealing ends up dead by gunshot from that same firearm and yet the final verdict is "No crime has been committed." Now how would you feel if that was your family member who had been killed?
Lightsy was not the one he accused. He was the station manager, and was trying to mediate the dispute.
@@TheHistoryGuyChannel Evidently I wasn't paying attention in class sir. I'll leave an apple on your desk to make up for the carelessness. :)
Ice Station Zebra meets The Thing
Many of those pictures look like the sets of the two versions of movie "The Thing"
It didn't move. It melted so no one would have to settle any more legal questions.
no thanks
I was imagining ice station zebra .
😮
The only relevant question: Can we sue the manufacturer of the bear gun?
It wouldn't be their fault, as the firearm in question was being stored improperly and not maintained in accordance with the manufacturers specifications .. (what some lawyer speaking on their behalf would say, probably) :/
Do you think maybe the mental health issues caused by desolation and isolation of that station might have contributed to the murder?
Yes. That was actually part of the defense case.
I thought it said felcher , 😛😛😛😛
👍👍👍